Honour

Honour is awarded rather than held, which is the whole difference between it and dignity. It comes from the endo-ideal, it is hierarchical and what it certifies is negative, the state of not being the negative image, so it is a clearance rather than a quality. Nothing about a person produces it and nothing about a person retains it, since whoever awards it can withdraw it. Dignity is the exosocial counterpart, preservation of ownership over one's own inner circles of self, which is owned rather than granted and can only be taken by an identifiable operation. Marsh puts the two side by side and the contrast is her argument. Honour is an endosocial term because it is a hierarchical measure of approval, and someone who would murder their daughter to save their honour could not be said to have a healthy membrane, since a healthy one is resilient, permeable and strong through relationships rather than dependent on external approval. That example is not an extreme case chosen for effect but the logic of the term completed, because if standing is granted from outside then anything threatening the grant threatens the person's whole position. The killings themselves are anima extraction in the same way ritual killings are, with the same goal of transferring power to the killers in order to remedy a depletion or meet an increased requirement, and like other shunning they are a way of restoring standing at somebody else's cost.

Honour cultures are a substantial subject in anthropology and social psychology, with Pitt-Rivers and Peristiany on the Mediterranean and Nisbett and Cohen's work on the American South linking honour norms to violence and to the historical absence of enforceable law. Peter Berger argued that modernity replaced honour with dignity as its organizing concept, and Appiah wrote on how honour codes change. The literature generally treats honour as a system of reputation with functional origins in weak states. Marsh keeps the reputational analysis and adds the direction, since specifying that the approval comes from an endo-ideal and certifies only the absence of negative image status turns a horizontal peer system into a vertical grant.